Does anyone still buy Versatec printers?

[guy at rlgvax.UUCP]

Another point of comparison between electrostatic printer-plotters and laser
printers: at my previous site we had a Gould electrostatic, and if you didn't
keep the computer room at the humidity level of the Amazon rain forest the
paper dried out and the print quality went downhill.  Also, electrostatic
printer-plotters require expensive coated paper, which goes brown if you
leave it in the sun too long (yes, regular paper will do that eventually too
but the time-to-failure is a few orders of magnitude greater) and which goes
all to h*ll if it gets wet.

Still, it is nice to be able to do your *own* formatting of raster images and
send them to the printer, instead of being forced to use the manufacturer's
idea of how things should be formatted.  Our Office Power office automation
system has a word processor which has its own definite ideas about how to
format lines of text, and the printers which will do it for you are at best
wasting their effort trying to be smart (if you can give them direct commands
and do it yourself) and at worst useless (if you are forced to live with their
way of doing tabs and line-spreading; they don't do everything we need them to
do).  Printers should either be 100% dumb or 100% intelligent (i.e. either
the host computer can tell them where to put the characters or dots or the
computer in the printer should be programmable so you can control where it
puts the characters or dots).

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy